A new hotel in Japan will have robots serving its front desks.

Japan Announces Plans for the First Hotel Run by Robots

Slated to open July 17, the hotel in a Japanese theme park will be staffed by “actroids”

Amager Resource Center, Copenhagen, Denmark. Under construction. This power plant, which turns household waste into electricity, is the cleanest in the world. "Normally, you want to be as far away from the power plant as possible because of the toxins, but in this case you literally have fresh mountain air on the roof of the building. Since we have snow in Denmark, but we don't have hills, we made the roof into a big ski slope," Ingels explains. The chimney puffs a giant steam ring each time a ton of carbon dioxide is emitted.

Designing Buildings For Hot Climates, Cold Ones and Everything in Between

A decade’s worth of sustainable projects by Danish architect Bjarke Ingels and his firm, BIG, are now on display at the National Building Museum

Art Molella delivers his speech on innovation.

The Innovative Spirit - OLD

The Recipe for Innovation Calls for a Little Chaos and Some Wall Bashing

Scholar Art Molella chronicles the habits, habitats and behaviors of the men and women who invent

Faced with the only high-cost options, Smithsonian researcher Whitman Miller began building his own portable, inexpensive monitoring stations.

Saving Money is Great, but Saving the Chesapeake Bay Will Be Even Better

Whitman Miller’s “off the shelf” technology may answer complicated questions about rising CO2 and ocean acidification

The 1354 painting, Dwelling in Seclusion in the Summer Mountains, by the artist Wang Meng is now on view at the Freer Gallery through May 31.

Why this 14th-Century Chinese Artist Is Having a Rebirth

The rare works of Wang Meng, an artist with a brilliance for brushstrokes, bring millions at auction

The Hemingwrite is a newfangled take on the old school typewriter, featuring cloud back-up.

This Week in Crowdfunding

Five Wild Ideas That Just Got Funded: From a Digital Typewriter to Treadmill-Powered Gaming

A Los Angeles group is also creating greeting cards with personalized audio messages from top celebrities

This temporary tattoo could save diabetics from the daily annoyance of pin pricks to their fingers.

Hacking the Human Body With Temporary Tattoos and Tiny Implants

Using electrical charges to treat diseases, from diabetes to obesity, is picking up speed

Cattleya aurantiaca

Orchidelirium, an Obsession with Orchids, Has Lasted for Centuries

The once-elusive flower’s striking beauty has inspired collectors and scientists to make it more accessible

SIRUM has facilitated the redistribution of 1 million pills to safety-net clinics to help serve about 20,000 patients in need.

Smart Startup

Three Stanford Graduates Are Matching Unused Prescriptions With Patients Who Need Them

Unopened drugs—billions of dollars worth—are trashed in this country each year. What if they instead went to the 50 million who can’t afford them?

What Is Bitcoin, Exactly?

A new book tells the backstory and provides an easy-to-understand explanation of the much buzzed-about cryptocurrency

Graphophone, recorded in October 1881. "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in our philosophy. I am a graphophone and my mother was a phonograph." Voice of Alexander Graham Bell's father.

Until Now, There Was No Play Button for the Recordings Bell and Edison Made in their Lab

An exhibition on sound kicks off the American History Museum’s Year of Innovation, enabling visitors to hear some of the earliest recordings

The chart is less a literal representation of the sea, but more an abstract illustration of the ways that ocean swells interact with land.

The Innovative Spirit - OLD

How Sticks and Shell Charts Became a Sophisticated System for Navigation

Sailors navigating with sextant, compass and maps found in the Marshall Islands that curved sticks and cowry shells were far more sophisticated

A windowless cabin design concept by Spike Aerospace.

Craziest Airplane Cabins of the Future

These airplane cabin designs—both real and conceptual—show what might await us on flights in the near future

A multihued aurora ripples across the night sky over Tromsø, Norway, on January 19. Auroras happen when high-energy particles from the sun slam into Earth's atmosphere, exciting gas molecules in the air and causing them to emit light. The colors seen depend on the type of molecules involved and the altitude at which the most interactions are happening. Green is the most common shade for auroras and is produced by oxygen molecules at relatively low altitudes—between 62 and 186 miles.

Best Space Photos of the Week

These Celestial Highlights Include Flowing Auroras and a Cracked Comet

Catch up on the week’s best space images, from a cyclone’s glowing eye to a surreal Martian vista

WÜF’s dog collar keeps owners connected to their canine companions at all times by offering two-way communication, GPS tracking and exercise monitoring

Five Wild Ideas That Just Got Funded

Five Wild Ideas That Just Got Funded: From A Fitbit for Dogs to Soap Jewelry

Not to mention, a bizarre bike-treadmill hybrid meant to reduce the strain on runners’ joints

The scales on Fragment C divide the year by days and signs of the zodiac.

Decoding the Antikythera Mechanism, the First Computer

Hidden inscriptions offer new clues to the origins of a mysterious astronomical mechanism

The International Space Station Will Soon Be Able to Measure Forest Density Using Lasers

Strengthening the planet’s forests is one critical way to combat climate change

A closeup of a Herculaneum papyrus scroll used in an international scanning project.

Ancient Scrolls Blackened by Vesuvius Are Readable at Last

X-ray scans can just tease out letters on the warped documents from a library at Herculaneum

The Eko Core Bluetooth-enabled stethoscope accessory will let doctors share heart sounds for virtual consultations.

Tech Watch

This Smart Stethoscope Attachment Could Lead to More Accurate Diagnoses

Eko Core clips on to existing stethoscopes and lets physicians share heart sounds through their smartphones and the Web

Ten years ago this week, the Huygens probe gave scientists a first look at the icy surface beneath the haze of Saturn's moon Titan.

Best Space Photos of the Week

Best Space Photos of the Week: From Solar Flares to Saturn’s Moons

A spitting sun, a well-loved lake and a happy accident on Mars star in this week’s best space images

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